


still you stay

by astarisms



Category: The Daevabad Trilogy - S. A. Chakraborty
Genre: Angst, F/M, Grieving, and a certain someone's citrus scent was explicitly mentioned multiple times in cob?, city of brass spoilers, hmmm, nahri is trying to heal, y'all ever notice that nahri's refuge is an orange grove
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-22
Updated: 2020-07-22
Packaged: 2021-03-04 20:07:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,268
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25452145
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/astarisms/pseuds/astarisms
Summary: sometimes the only things you have are ghosts.
Relationships: Darayavahoush e-Afsin/Nahri e-Nahid
Comments: 7
Kudos: 19





	still you stay

**Author's Note:**

> alternate title that was too long but I am still extremely impartial to: 'citrus breeze, emerald leaves (and the way you bring me to my knees)'

It is well known that the Banu Nahida’s orange grove is off limits to anyone who is not Banu Nahri herself. It is the only space that she has to herself, free of prying ears and eyes, of the ever increasing demands from Nisreen and her patients, of the weight of Ghassan’s thumb and the pressure this beautiful, broken city heaps on her. 

It is her only reprieve. 

It is also the only place she can talk to Dara.

The thought of him still leaves a piece of her raw, too hurt and confused and tired to even begin to try to cut through the thorny brambles surrounding her feelings for the Afshin, nevermind attempting to figure out where things had gone so drastically wrong. 

But for all the pain the memory of him brings, the ghost of him is the only thing she can confide in. She knows better than to put any stock in her husband, even if he has been kind, and though she loves Nisreen she has learned to recognize the limit between them. 

Dara, however, she has always been able to open up to. Unequivocally. He may not have always said what she wanted to hear, but he had been an eager listener, and she would be lying if she said she didn’t miss the weight of his full attention on her. 

Creator, she misses him. 

“I’m so tired,” she says to the open air of her orange grove one day shortly after it has been restored. She’s not sure why she says it, only that she needed to get it off of her chest and she knows that she can’t say as much to Nisreen. She can’t admit defeat so easily, not when she had promised she would be the Banu Nahida the Daeva deserved.

But the light catches on the leaves in the canopy, and the way they glow combined with the citrus scent heavy in the air makes Nahri’s breath catch. She feels a little silly for it. It is no sign, there is no ghost waiting to communicate with her, but she is so  _ lonely _ … 

“I’m so tired, Dara,” she whispers this time, as if saying the words quieter would make them any less foolish. She closes her eyes and lets the wind play in her hair and ruffle the leaves in response. 

_ Idiot, _ she thinks, but some of the weight has lifted. 

“You were supposed to stay here with me. You were supposed to help me. I wasn’t supposed to have to do this on my own.” Her eyes burn, and she blinks back the tears, swallowing hard. She stands there for a minute, in the center of her orange grove, and when nothing happens she turns and walks out.

*

The next time she takes refuge there, she’s frustrated and pacing. She stops, concerned about wearing a path into the grass, before she remembers that it’s magical and resumes.

“You know,” she says, ripping her chador off and tossing it to the side, fed up with everyone and everything, “your specific brand of condescension might have been annoying at times, but it was harmless.” She stops again, looking up at the interlocking boughs above her head when she realizes what she’s doing.

But it feels  _ good _ to vent.

If she tries hard enough, she can almost picture him leaning languidly against one of the trunks, watching her intently, eyes alight with indignation. 

“Don’t look at me like that,” she says, feeling utterly ridiculous for talking to a ghost of her own making but unable to help herself. The words feel a little disingenuous, because in truth, she would give anything if it meant he were actually here to do so, but she presses on. “You were plenty condescending with your outdated wisdom.”

He opens his mouth, then closes it, his brows furrowing. Nahri’s chest constricts, because she knows that look as intimately as she knows the back of her hand—branded in her memory from days and nights and weeks of teasing conversation with the infuriating daeva—and she knows she’ll never truly see it again.

She takes a step forward, though whether it’s to commit that expression to memory or to challenge him further, she doesn’t know, because the image of him wavers and vanishes. She stops, staring at the spot his visage had been. 

It nearly brings her to her knees, because even a year later she can’t shake the memory of him turning to ash before her eyes. She picks up her chador with trembling hands, and considers walking out again, because how is she supposed to find relief in a place that he haunts?

Then the wind rustles through the leaves and lifts her hair, as if urging her to  _ stay _ .

But the breeze carries that citrus perfume, the one that reminds her so strongly of him, and she loses her resolve before she can lose the battle with her emotions.

  
*

The third time she finds herself in her orange grove, she has a collection of medical tomes gathered in her arms, and she sets them down heavy in the grass. If she’s going to be here in the only space that belongs solely to her anymore, she needs a distraction that isn’t a ghost.

And truly, this is the first chance she’s gotten to look through this last set of her ancestors’ books with any amount of scrutiny, and she embraces the spark of excitement that lights in her chest at the prospect. 

Despite the circumstances surrounding her marriage to Muntadhir, she had still managed to negotiate the Nahid texts and time for her own training. Without the burden of treating patients she was wholly unequipped and vastly unprepared for, she had been much more comfortable exploring what her powers were capable of, and thrilled to see that the effort had been worth it when they had reopened the infirmary.

She settles in, propping open the cover and carefully flipping the ancient pages, eagerly drinking in the old Divasti handwriting and detailed illustrations… 

And then her mind catches up with her eyes, and she gasps, resisting the urge to slam the text shut again, because the page she is staring at looks remarkably familiar to one she had caught a young prince studying more than a year ago.

She shuts down the line of thinking that leads to the boy she had once foolishly considered a friend, instead tracing the drawing lightly with a finger. It is the anatomy of a slave, similar to the basic outline she had glimpsed before, except this one is more detailed. She leans in to read the notes about the lack of bodily functions and the deeper insights into how blood magic ties the soul to a hollow vessel.

These are not so much the horrifying warnings and sympathetic insights into an enslaved djinn as much as a concise, though illuminating, look into how they existed.

_ And how their souls could be restored to a body _ , she realizes suddenly, and the understanding of what she has in her hands is enough to knock the breath from her. She looks up, out into her grove, and there’s a flash of emerald in her periphery, one she knows is just the leaves in the canopy.

She feels the phantom press of smoldering eyes anyways.

“This could teach me how to save them,” she whispers out loud, because this knowledge feels too big to carry beyond her grove—beyond the two of them. “I could have… one day I might have… if you hadn’t…”

She trails off, unable to finish the thought. Her breath shudders out of her at the implications, at the  _ what if _ s and the  _ could have been _ s.

The uncomfortably familiar burn of tears builds behind her eyes, and she clenches her jaw against them. Steeling herself, she shuts the tome, and shoves it aside, pulling another before her.

She is not ready for the implications of  _ that. _ Not yet.

*

The next time she visits the grove is the first time a procedure has gone dreadfully, horribly wrong since the night she could not save the sheik, the night she tries hard not to linger on for the long list of reasons it is remembered as the worst in her life.

She hadn’t been quite so rash or inconsolable this time; she had cleaned up the body and stayed to talk to the woman’s grieving family, to offer her condolences and apologies with a practiced steadiness.

But now, in the solace of her garden, that old uncertainty rears its head, the inexplicable feeling that she doesn’t know what she’s doing, that she doesn’t belong here, that she’ll never be  _ good enough— _

She presses the heel of her hands into her eyes to ease the pressure building behind them, because she will not cry, she won’t, and forces herself to take a series of deep breaths in an attempt to ease the weight on her chest. But it doesn’t ease, because she can still see the accusations in that family’s eyes, she can still feel the last spark of life in her patient extinguish under her hands, and she feels like the Nahri of more than a year ago again.

Like nothing more than a street thief posing as a healer in a city that will never be home.

_ You’re not a terrible healer _ .

The words return to her unbidden, so clearly that she looks up in shock, her heart stopping with a sudden, painful jolt that feels alarmingly like hope. But there is nothing more than the empty grove and the wind whispering through the leaves, and she digs her nails into her palm, refusing to be reduced to tears by voices in her head. But it’s  _ his  _ voice and just like every other part of him, it haunts her, and the rest of that conversation from a day that feels like centuries ago comes back to her in pieces.

_ You’re not.  _

“Tell that to the woman I couldn’t save,” she retorts angrily to empty air. “Tell that to her family. I spent a  _ year _ —” She chokes, unable to finish, unable to voice her own failures aloud. 

_ Give yourself time. You’re in Daevabad now. Start thinking in terms of decades and centuries instead of months and years. _

The soft reassurances, pulled up from the deepest recesses of her memory, should not comfort her as much as they do. Maybe it’s the encouragement behind them, spoken so earnestly once upon a time, or maybe it’s the fact that that conversation had simply been her last with him that hadn’t ended in some nightmarish way. 

Whatever it is, they give her the strength to pull herself back together. 

She will not fall apart this time.

*

The more Nahri frequents her grove, the more she vents her frustrations to the empty air and receives phantom responses from the wind whistling through the trees and sunlight gilding the emerald leaves, the easier it gets. To move forward, to keep her head high, to ensure her spirit remains unbroken, were all things she could have accomplished without this spot—spite was a powerful motivator indeed, and Nahri had not survived under one oppressor’s thumb or another to be broken now—but it helps. 

The implications regarding the connection between her sanity and the almost therapeutic aspects of talking to ghosts aside, she finds comfort in the memory she has of him, of the parts of him she had loved, even if they had annoyed her endlessly, and not the grotesque, bloody picture Ghassan had painted her.  _ That _ was an issue she wasn’t ready to untangle quite yet, and perhaps never would be.

He had been the only person she had ever allowed herself to be completely honest with, and now that she is intimately acquainted with the heartbreak that comes with that vulnerability, she is determined to never let herself slip like that again.

But it changes nothing that had already happened. He was the only one who knew all of her darkest fears, her deepest desires, and regardless of whether she sounds crazy for talking to memories, it helps ease the pressure in her chest before any cracks can appear in the armor she’s so carefully constructed around herself.

Today, however, she finds herself in her sanctuary not to rant or reveal the insecurities she holds so close to her heart, but for a confession. She closes her eyes and breathes in the fresh air, the citrusy breeze, reminded of the first time she had stepped foot in this restored grove and spoken to the impression of him that burned behind her eyelids and took root in reality, the same way one might turn their closed eyes towards the sun then blink away spots upon opening them again.

Except she cannot blink Dara away, no matter how she tries. 

“I miss you,” she whispers, the first time she’s said as much aloud since his death nearly two years ago. And despite everything, despite that night, despite what she had learned about him since, she continues softly, “I wish you were here. I think…”

She trails off, opening her eyes and looking around, once again struck by how much space his absence took up. One month by his side and two years later, Daevabad still didn’t feel  _ right  _ without him.

“I think you could have been happy here.” 

The wind rustles the leaves again, softly, and she turns her face up to let it wash over her, the breeze imitating the gentle caress of knuckles along her jaw. 

Today, Nahri lingers.


End file.
